PUBLIC SERVICE. New broadcasting licences for the Swedish public service broadcasters Sveriges Television, Sveriges Radio and Utbildningsradion are to be decided. The Swedish government will first adopt its own position and is expected to submit a proposal to parliament in May. Parliament will then decide on the issue in the autumn.

The debate about net hatred flares up at regular intervals but gained momentum recently when several prominent female media personalities decided to talk openly about receiving hateful comments and the threats on Sveriges Television's investigative programme Uppdrag Granskning. 
   During the summer of 2011, Media Sweden suffered a collective allergic reaction to their online comments fields. Several sites closed them down completely. The reason was "net hatred" and the trigger was the repercussions of Breivik's mass murder in neighbouring Norway. A lot of people at the time decided to write about the net hatred issue, me included.
   Swedish Radio's debate site Journalism 3.0 - Media ecology and the future is here republishing a net hatred debate piece by Christian Gillinger, digital media project manager at public service Swedish Radio, which he put up (in Swedish) on his private blog.

STOCKHOLM, SWEDEN. The latest Eurobarometer from the European Commission shows that Swedish radio enjoys an extremely high trust rating. Four out of five Swedes say they have confidence in the radio, the highest trust rating of any single medium in any of the EU member countries. Swedish television has 70 percent of citizens' confidence while the press has 43 percent and internet media 30 percent. The average trust rating across Europe for radio clocks in at 54 percent, which means that radio as a medium enjoys the highest confidence.
   Mats Svegfors, former head of Swedish Radio (Swedish public service radio) shares his view on the latest figures.

On November 16th, 2010, we published our virtual book Journalism 3.0 - Media Ecology and the Future. We had begun this book project a year before then in the autumn of 2009. Today, our online book and the debate blog is celebrating its second anniversary and we can say that developments that we have tracked in the past year have been dramatic.  
  Cilla Benkö, director general of Swedish Radio, and Mats Svegfors, former director general of Swedish Radio, take a look back.

After only a few weeks in the job, BBC Director General George Entwistle resigned on Saturday. On Monday, the organisation’s director of news, Helen Boaden, and her deputy Stephen Mitchell followed suit. These developments follow two noteworthy editorial decisions in the production of BBC2’s Newsnight.
   Mats Svegfors, former Director General of Swedish Radio, gives his view on the events and argues that they are significant also from a Swedish media perspective.

What are the threats to investigative journalism? How can we maintain quality and credibility in journalism? Listen to a seminar from Almedalen - the week of politics on the island of Gotland, Sweden, July 5th.

With: Nick Davies, journalist at The Guardian, Cilla Benkö deputy director general of Swedish Radio, Martin Jönsson, managing editor at Svenska Dagbladet. Moderator: Helena Groll, journalist at Swedish Radio.

Update: As a result of Nick Davies' statements about Julian Assange in the seminar, Swedish Radio is now trying to reach Assange in order to give him a chance to respond.

It has often been said that what is happening to the newspaper industry has been caused by public service media. Some claim that our activities online have harmed commercial media; that we have made it impossible for newspapers to regain from the net what they have lost in print. Some also claim that if the activities of public service media online were to be limited then the newspapers would no longer have such difficulties. But this is obviously not true. What is happening is a far reaching change of the media society.
   Mats Svegfors, Director General of Swedish Radio, spoke about medias important role in the democratic society at the Eurodig conference in Stockholm.

Free press is relatively hard to find these days and hard-hitting journalism is generally challenged by censorship. However, there is a concealed obstacle ahead of free press that is self-censorship caused by, one of the professional norms for journalists, “objectivity”.
   This says Afrah Nasser, blogger and journalist in exile from Jemen. At the moment she is an intern at the arabic section of Swedish Radio International. This is the story about her meeting with swedish public service and the journalistic rules about objectivity and impartiality.

PUBLIC SERVICE. The European Broadcasting Union (EBU) has over 85 national media organizations as members from 56 countries in and around Europe. It has represented and served its Members for more than 60 years and promotes the values and distinctiveness of public service media in Europe and around the world. As President of the EBU, I am proud of our Union and it's history and within that context I am especially appreciative of the strong public service media tradition that has existed in the Nordic countries and in Sweden in particular.
   Jean-Paul Philippot is in Stockholm this week for Radio Assembly and wants to bring attention to the increasing threats against public service in Europe.

BRITISH PRESS AFTER LEVESON. The phone hacking scandal and the following Leveson Inquiry has turned into a kind of trial on british press, with discussions on future regulations of the press.
   Charlie Beckett, director of Polis – the journalism think-tank at the London School of Economics – welcomes the reform that Leveson might bring, but says it is possible that British newspapers will get their ethical spring-clean too late. 

Traditional journalism can be made into a product. It can be packaged and marketed like a newspaper, or like a program, or like a subscription to a TV or radio channel. Thus, it has been possible for traditional journalism, what the Canadian journalist and media researcher Ira Basen calls Journalism 1.0, to thrive in symbioses with the market.
   But what kind of product results when traditional journalism is replaced by a dialogue between editorial offices and the consumer/audience—in other words, that which we call Journalism 3.0? 
  Mats Svegfors and Cilla Benkö address this important question regarding journalism's business models and conclude that packaging and selling journalism of the future is problematic.

FREEDOM OF EXPRESSION. The old democracy of Greece is the problem child of the Euro zone. But the new democracy of Hungary is a problem for the entire European Union. In Greece, the economy is unstable. As for Hungary, the entire democratic process is in question.
   When all is said and done, Hungary may with time become a much bigger problem for the European Union than Greece, writes Mats Svegfors.

ONE YEAR ANNIVERSARY. In the middle of November 2010, we published our virtual book Journalism 3.0 – Media Ecology and the Future. We had started the project a year earlier, back in the fall of 2009. Smartphones were still something rather new: Apple's 3G model had been around for just a little more than a year and iPad had not yet been officially launched in Sweden.
   Our ambition with the project was to discuss media development and its influence on politics in a democratic society. Mats Svegfors and Cilla Benkö summarize the first year of Journalism 3.0 on its first birthday.

We’ve earlier touched upon several aspects of foreign reporting but did not address it in its entirety. One important reason for now aiming our attention at foreign journalism in general and foreign correspondents in particular is the experiences at Swedish Radio during the past six months.
   Mats Svegfors, Director General, and Cilla Benkö Deputy Director General of Swedish Radio, writes about foreign journalism and thinks that media must take their responsibility for reporting from the world as “one place”. 

Welcome to a book that we hope you will write together with us!

We—Mats Svegfors, Director General and Cilla Benkö Deputy Director General of Swedish Radio —had thought we would write a traditional book about media development. We soon discovered—as did Lars Johannesson with whom we are working on this project—that there is both too much and too little knowledge about media and media use. The task of exposing today’s situation and understanding what it is that ultimately determines future advances gets lost amid the wealth of information produced all over the world about media use, media economy and media technology. And one of the tools needed for the task—a theory of media for sorting and systematizing the knowledge—doesn’t exist. How do we, in this day and age, manage such an analysis under uncertain conditions? Well, we utilize the very chaotic media reality that we’re looking at.

Was the 2010 Swedish parliamentary election decided on the Internet? What really happened when Barack Obama was elected America’s president in 2008? Was this the first time social media was the determining factor for democracy?
   Clear-cut answers don’t exist, but one element is apparent: the large electorates participate in the democratic process through established media. It’s there they meet up with the content that determines their political positions. But at the same time established media has weakened. Superficially, the old structure appears strong but there are cracks in the foundation.
   Where will democracy take place in the future? Everyone knows huge changes are occurring. But still the purveyors of big media seem to assume that tomorrow will be essentially like yesterday—that everything will be different while hardly anything will be changed.

Social media, Emilie, Barack Obama, Youtube, television debates, Twitter, Facebook, MyBo, daily newspapers, Rupert Murdock, BSkyB, Max Weber, Jürgen Habermas, Manuel Castells, Marshall McLuhan, Clay Shirky, Wikinomics, ABC News, Bonnier

HISTORY. Newspapers are our oldest mass medium. It wasn’t until the telegraph, however, made the transmission of news independent of geographic distances that newspapers became a modern mass medium. Newspapers reigned sovereign for the next 100 years. It gained a monopoly on information, it gained political power, and it created enormous fortunes for owners.
   Radio broke the grip of the newspapers during the 1920s. Three decades later, television grew out of the big radio companies. Newspaper, radio and television became the media of the modern era. This era has ended; we live in a new time. The time serpent is molting. We don’t yet know what the new skin will look like. We don’t recognize it; we can’t distinguish it. We’re even less able to discern its pattern.

Berlingske Tidende, telegraphy, train traffic, telephone, telefax, development block, Erik Dahmén, daily newspaper circulation, The Times, The Guardian, Metro, Wikipedia, BBC, Herbert Hoover, SBS, MTG, Spotify, Pandora, NPR, FCC, NBC, CBS, ABC, Karmansbo, Tony Judt, Hans L Zetterberg, The time serpent (Tidens orm)

FORM AND CONTENT. There’s a common logic in media: That which suits television is aired on television; if something makes a good headline, it’s placed on the front page of the newspaper.
   In this way, media shapes society. Media technology determines the content. And the content in media determines images of society. But perhaps it’s not that simple. The interaction between technological, political and commercial forces can be significantly more complex. The Third Reich made radio big. Consumerism has made daily newspapers and television big. The media society is now experiencing rapid transformation. It’s a battle between forces and counterforces; stakes are high and the outcome uncertain.

Kim Phuc, Alan Down, Trang Bang, Vietnam War, New York’s population, 1700s Stockholm, New York Times, Chicago Tribune, Washington Post, Joseph Pulitzer, William Randolph Hearst, Marshall McLuhan, Franklin D Roosevelt, “Fireside Chats”, Charles Lindbergh, HG Wells, Orson Welles, Adolf Hitler, Kristina Riegert, Winston Churchill, BBC, John F Kennedy, Martin Luther King, Christopher Wain, Hiroshima, Nagasaki, Tiananmen Square, 9/11, Rwanda, Iraq, Afghanistan, Wikileaks, Ground Report

ESTABLISHED MEDIA. Large economic shifts are occurring within the world of media. Internet revenue, for both its use as well as advertising, is virtually exploding. At the same time, newspaper revenues are down and television is stagnating.
   The response from the daily newspapers is to save, save, save. Inevitably, editorial ambitions are lowered. In principle, the same forces are at work in commercial television. Its response is to shift the focus from news and socially relevant context to entertainment. For several reasons, it is difficult for the established media companies to compete against the entrepreneurs of the new media economy. This is particularly true for the daily media. For journals and books, the situation is different.

PricewaterhouseCoopers “Global Entertainment and Media Outlook”, Internet access, daily newspaper revenues in North America, advertisement dependency, employed by American daily newspapers, daily newspapers in Western Europe,productivity, efficiency, review, savings, rationalizations potential, low cost TV, television, news office, structured costs, local editorial offices, genre editorial offices, Svenska Dagbladet, Dagens Nyheter, tabloid format, broadsheet, Baumol's Disease, Bill Hackos, Newsweek, Der Spiegel, The Economist, L’Express, Le Nouvel Observateur, News Corp, Metro, e-book, e-newspaper, bookreading, e-reader, iPad magazine

ANOTHER WAY OF THINKING. There are a number of well acknowledged and renowned commentators who seriously endeavor to see into the digital future: Clay Shirky, Chris Anderson, Alex S Jones, Jay Rosen, and Jeff Jarvis, to name few. The debate is ongoing, mainly in the USA although not exclusively. It’s easy to find quality contributions to the discussion, on the Internet and in books, about the totally different future.
   It’s much more difficult, if not impossible, to find commentators who claim, in an intellectual and credible manner, that daily newspapers will once again regain their former position. Even fewer voices try to prove that news and current events television programs will once again become the meeting place for democratic enlightenment and dialogue.

Facebook, Google, Wikipedia, Clay Shirky, Chris Anderson, Wired, The Long Tail, niche channels, TV 4, Rapport 19.30, ABC, CBS, NBC, Alex S Jones, Jay Rosen, Jeff Jarvis, Shorenstein Center, Jason Pontin, Technology Review, Kevin Kelly, James Fallows, The Atlantic, Nieman Journalism Lab, Nieman Reports, The State of the News Media, Reuters Institute, Rasmus Kleis Nielsen, Charlie Beckett, POLIS, Elihu Katz, The Annals, Milly Buonanno, Nordicom, Ulla Carlsson, Pelle Snickars, Lars Ilshammar, Lars Nord, ”Framtidens medietider”, Ingela Wadbring

THE INTERNET WORLD. Major breakthroughs for new media technology in the past involved rapid and fairly cohesive processes. With the Internet and web now making their impact following development that has been at least 20 years in the making, the process is much more complex and drawn out, mostly due to the pervasiveness of the technology shift. The picture as a whole is thus more difficult to take in and understand.
   As with all major change processes, a game of opposites develops between control and freedom, order and chaos. The potential controllers aren’t only in government and parliaments throughout the world. Large companies also want to exercise control over the market.

Herbert Hoover, Gustaf Reuterswärd, Tidningarnas Telegrambyrå (The Newspapers’ Telegram Bureau), Radiotjänst, Swedish Radio and Television Act, SR Play, SVT Play, Web 1.0, Web 2.0, Web 3.0, Tim O’Reilly, Blogger, Second Life, America On Line, Organizing for America, Blackfoot Valley Dispatch, kissies.se, console games, X-box, PlayStation, Wii, World of Warcraft, Tetris, Internet Society

THE INTERNET MEDIA. We talk about tomorrow, but there’s so much that is new that doesn’t belong to tomorrow; it’s already in place. This is apparent regarding social media. But new media also fills “old media” functions. Users share news on Facebook. News tips are passed on via Twitter. But someone has to provide the original journalism that is being shared. There are also “neo traditional” media: In the USA, Huffington Post and Politico are two examples, reporting on politics and social issues. So far, USA is leading this area since American society is so much bigger and more often reaches “critical mass”.

Yahoo, America Online, Huffington Post, Politico, Pro Publica, Slate, About.com, Google, Facebook, Twitter

USE. New media appear but the old remain. This is what’s been said since the breakthrough of television in the 1950s. It still applies. The big difference now is that new media undermine the economic basis of the old media. The average Swede spends plenty of time online but it’s still the traditional media that dominate when it comes to news and current events. Generational differences are significant. The Internet is changing the Swedish media society. The changes are even more tangible in the USA.
   Much points toward a socially and culturally stratified media society. A global, English-language public arena is taking shape. This can facilitate democracy on a national level but it demands national broad media that connects the global availability of qualified knowledge with the national public.

Mediebarometern, Nordicom, Mediesverige 2010, Olle Findahl, Svenskarna och internet 2009, Pew Research Center, Fox News, CNN, ABC, NBC, CBS, World Internet Institute, Unga svenskar och internet 2009, Nick Bilton,  Veckans Affärer, Fokus, Härliga hund, Ny Teknik